About
This is where I write down what we learned running cafés.
Spoke & Stringer was a hospitality brand in Bristol from 2009 onwards. Two cafés, fifteen years, plenty of hard-won lessons. The cafés are gone. The lessons stayed.
I started this site because every time I look at a piece of advice for new hospitality operators online, it reads like it was written by someone who has never actually run a kitchen at 7am on a Saturday. Compliance, in particular, gets the worst of it: pages of sanitised vendor copy that does not help anyone get an EHO 5-star rating.
So this is the other version. Real stories, real mistakes, real fixes. The tools and templates we used. Where it makes sense, I point at the things we built into Paddl because they worked. Where it does not, I just tell you what we did.
Read next
- The story. How Spoke & Stringer started, what worked, what did not.
- Why we built Paddl. The specific pain points that became a product.
- Start with the guides. The practical operator knowledge base.